MyOutSpirit.com Gay Spirituality Blog

Beyond alphabet soup: a campus group looks for a new name

By Joe Perez

Boos and hisses to The Daily Dish and Slog, two blogs which picked up a story about the LGBT group at the University of Michigan in the midst of changing its name. Slog makes a valid point, at least, that the group seems preoccupied with process (Slog calls them "process queens"). But then to score rhetorical points, the crabby Dan Savage at Slog invents the term "LGBTQIALMNOP community" and implies that U of M is actually contemplating such a horrible name. Not true. Equally crabby Andrew Sullivan picks up the meme, suggesting that the LGBT group at U of M wants to rename itself the "The Office of LGBTQRSTV Affairs". Another fiction. Both Slog and The Daily Dish resort to fiction to ridicule the college club, presumably in a wanting effort at parody.

But does the group at U of M deserve such parody? From what I can tell by reading the group's actual online document, neither Savage nor Sullivan are representing the group fairly. According to the group's website, the name change initiative was inaugurated in an attempt to actually move beyond alphabet soup and acronym-based, label-based group names. They seem to recognize the dilemma posed by the sort of naming policies in the past that simply added letter to an acronym in a misguided effort to add to a "hierarchy of oppressions". They write:

Several peer organizations, particularly institutions of higher education, but also national organizations, have names of LGBTQ centers/offices that make no mention of specific letters:
UMass Amherst: Stonewall Center
CSU-Sonoma: Center for Gender and Sexuality
UConn: Rainbow Center
The Task Force
Human Rights Campaign

*The Office of LGBT Affairs began as the Human Sexuality Office and, since then, there have been many permutations and iterations of the name of the Office (Lesbian and Gay Male Programs Office, then Bisexual was added, then Transgender was added). It is necessary that the Office adopt a name that will withstand "naming" and labeling trends.

In other words, the Office at U of M is seeking to overcome precisely the problem in naming that Savage and Sullivan are accusing them of supporting. They want to overcome labeling trends, not immerse themselves in the latest and greatest labeling fad!

Savage's ridicule of "process queens" isn't wrong; it just seems too obvious. Sullivan's criticism seems more culpable, for he either willfully misrepresents the LGBT campus group or seems not to have read the actual U of M LGBT group website, for he writes, "I have no idea why the gay rights movement has to be represented by a term that looks like a hamlet in Croatia..." (which is actually the point being made by the folks at U of M -- they don't want a term like LGBT to represent the community; they are looking at terms such as The Taskforce and The Rainbow Center among others as guides for overcoming alphabet soup).

Listen, bloggers. If a group wants to overcome terms that look like Croatian (no offense, Croatians), then why hold them up for ridicule? They should be receiving nods from folks who despise acronym soup, not ridicule. So let's just shrug off Savage and Sullivan this time and trust the folks at U of M to make good progress on their name. My two cents: they could do worse in naming than Rainbow Center.

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Seattle-based writer Joe Perez, author of Soulfully Gay, blogs at until.joe-perez.com.

Gender-blind bathrooms: a short-sighted solution?

By Joe Perez

Today I learned about the Genderblind.org website for a group that promotes gender-neutral college dorm policies (thanks for the tip, Hugo). Students at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, aspire to change the way the nation's college dorms separate facilities by gender. From their website:

The National Student Genderblind Campaign is a student-initiated, grass-roots organization working to achieve gender-neutral collegiate policies. By engaging students from colleges and universities across the nation, the National Student Genderblind Campaign strives to serve as a comprehensive source of information for those who wish to implement gender-neutral policy of their own.

As a matter of principle, I must say that I prefer gender awareness to gender blindness. Walking through life with one's eyes closed to gender similarities and differences is not a policy I can advocate, as a rule. Nor do I hold "neutrality" as a moral ideal, except as pertains to formal equality of all individuals before the law; "neutrality" when applied to matters of culture tend to be hopelessly romantic ideals usually offered with good intentions but resulting in poor policies with unanticipated negative consequences for everyone concerned.

Seminaries and LGBT inclusion

by Dwight Welch

One of the encouraging signs of future change in the mainline church is the establishment of gay and lesbian centers at seminaries. The education of future ministers in the church gives a hint of the future of that church. There are two centers which have recently caught my attention.

The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry at the Pacific School of Religion and the The LGBTQ Religious Studies Center at Chicago Theological Seminary. Both are UCC schools. Hopefully they represent the sort of collaboration and work that will take place in more and more schools in other denominations.

The center at PSR aims to "transform faith communities and wider society by taking  a leading role in shaping a new public discourse on religion and sexuality through  research, education for leadership, community building and advocacy.

Gay Religion: An Evaluation

Gay Religion, Eds. Scott Thumma and Edward R. Gray

“A Religion of One’s Own: Gender and LGBT Religiosities” (Melissa M. Wilcox)

“Shades of Grey or Back to Nature? The Enduring Qualities of Ex-Gay Ministries” (Christy M. Ponticelli)

“Negotiating a Religious Identity: The Case of the Gay Evangelical” (Scott Thumma)

A few weeks ago, I purchased Gay Religion and promised to write more about the text as I read through it.  I’ve now read three of the articles, skimmed through the titles and opening paragraphs of the others, and would recommend this as a classroom textbook.  Unless you’re very interested in statistically based sociological analysis of the LGBT culture, I would suggest that you forgo this book and pick up something more accessible and readable.  However, this would make an excellent beginning reader in a sociology or religious studies classroom, as well as a thorough resource for gay and lesbian writers, gay-friendly parishes/congregations, and non-profit organizations working in these overlapping areas.

I chose the three essays above because they most closely tracked with my own personal experience, giving me a better yardstick for evaluation then the essays on gay male culture.  Ponticelli’s article on ex-gay ministries arises from her experience “undercover” at the 1992 Exodus conference and subsequent months in a Northern California ex-gay ministry.  She claims that her purpose is not to evaluate whether these ministries are appropriate or successful, but to understand their appeal.  This is a laudable intention, to hear before critiquing, and to give the benefit of doubt to those one might consider “enemies” of LGBT persons.  Unfortunately, I wonder, as she seems to in her conclusion, whether this is even possible.

Gay Religion

I've picked up a new book, Gay Religion, edited by Scott Thumma and Edward R. Gray.  Published in November 2004 by Altamira Press, it is a compilation of essays by academics and practitioners about gay practice and identity in a cross-section of spiritual communities.  From Seventh-day Adventists to evangelicals to Jews to the gay male leather community, this book has an essay to interest any sub-niche that is typically the focus of mainstream dissmisal.  There are broader essay topics as well, such as religious music, spiritual identity growth, etc.  I hope to use this text as a jumping off point for some thought this month about my own spiritual journey.

As it is useful for our readers, I'll post.  In the meantime, this is a recommendation for a book that could easily be integrated into classroom or personal study.  Some of the essays that I'm excited to read include:

"The Gay God of the City: The Emergence of the Gay and Lesbian Ethnic Parish" (Leonard Norman Primiano)

"Negotiating a Religious Identity: The Case of the Gay Evangelical" (Scott Thumma)

"Shades of Grey or Back to Nature? The Enduring Qualities of Ex-Gay Ministries" (Christy M. Ponticelli)

"Pluralism and Diversity: Music as Discourse and Information in a Gay and Lesbian Congregation" (W. Bernard Lukenbill)

"A Religion of One's Own: Gender and LGBT Religiosities" Melissa M. Wilcox

There's more.  The book has 21 chapters, plus an appendix with resources for LGBT spirituality.

We're paying $900 million for THIS?

$900 million of our tax dollars will be spent to encourage people to have less sex, says a report in the Washington Post. But wait, that's not the shocking part of the story! It turns out that federally funded "educational" programs that promote sexual abstinence are spending nearly a billion dollars on programs that give teens truly ridiculous misinformation. The false claims include the assertion that a 43-day-old fetus is a "thinking person," and the lie that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus. Thanks to GetReligion for the link.

Since Terry Mattingly's blog is an examination of the treatment of religion in the press, he focuses attention not on the misinformation and lies of the abstinence "education" programs, but on the fairness of the journalism. He says, "I would imagine that the progressives quoted in the Connolly piece would say she treated them fairly, while the conservatives scream bloody murder."

Then as an example of conservatives screaming bloody murder, he cites an angry conservative (who happens to be Maureen Dowd's brother) who complained bitterly: "Last week on the news, I heard that the Montgomery County school board voted to include a class with a 10th-grade girl demonstrating how to put a condom on a cucumber and a study of the homosexual lifestyle. The vote was 6-0. I feel better about the money all the time."

I hadn't heard anything about a 6-0 school board vote for cucumber condoms and a study of the homosexual lifestyle, so I immediately wondered if this was true or simply another example of the agitprop that the religious right is famous for.

The Montgomery County school board decision apparently refers to the events described in this article. True enough, the education program for tenth graders does include information about condom use and homosexuality. However, two facts that the conservative who cried bloody murder conveniently ignored: 

(1) "Parents will be required to sign permission slips before their children can take the sexuality component of the mandatory class, and the syllabus will be available for parental review ... About 1 percent of the county's high school students opt out of the sex education component of their health classes, said Dale Fulton, an associate superintendent. Those students are given three alternatives: independent study, a unit that covers only abstinence as a method of birth control or a unit on stress management."

(2) Discussions of homosexuality in the county aren't new. What's new is that students will be given factual information about homosexuality and bisexuality instead of pretending that gays and bisexuals don't exist.

"Historically, we've avoided this issue in not a very educated way," said board Vice President Patricia O'Neill (Bethesda-Chevy Chase). "Homosexuality is part of the world we live in. There's no moral judgment there. But we've been pretending it doesn't exist, sweeping it under the rug, and it's good we're going to address it finally."

Surely Mattingly is correct that once news of the Post article on the misinformation disseminated by abstinence education programs gets out, shrill conservatives will cry bloody murder. But who's listening to their  propaganda about educators indoctrinating youth in "the homosexual lifestyle" anyway? Fortunately, not the Montgomery County school board. What defies belief is Mattingly's suggestion that failure to include the opinions of folks like Maureen Dowd's brother in mainstream religion reporting may constitute bias.

Mattingly's commentary is more interesting when he points out that the Post article side-steps a thorny issue.  He asks: "How does an institution funded with tax dollars offer sex-education materials that say that sex outside of marriage is just peachy -- or that it is sin, sin, sinful -- without attacking the moral beliefs on one or the other side of this divide?"

Indeed, there is no such thing as value-neutral education. Conservatives clearly want the education issue to be framed as "whose values should we teach?" They think this is the way to make the world safe for hysterical lies such as the claim that half of gay youth have AIDS.

Mattingly frames the issue as a decision as to whether public education should affirm traditional morality or sexual libertinism. But as the Montgomery County program highlights, this may be a false choice.

Presenting medically accurate information about contraception and homosexuality doesn't need to infringe upon the rights of conservative parents and youth. Montgomery County provides an excellent model for how spiritual progressives can frame this sensitive issue.

Spiritual progressives should make it clear that all parents should be given the right to review sex education materials and choose to allow their children not to participate. This shows genuine respect for the religious and moral beliefs of the parents while making it difficult for the question of "whose values do we teach?" from gaining traction.

If Montgomery County is any guide, as many of 99 percent of parents aren't concerned about their children being given medically accurate facts about sex, including information about contraception and acknowledging the existence of homosexuality.

Progressives should frame the question like this: "Shall an institution funded with tax dollars offer sex-education materials that give medically accurate facts, or propaganda and misinformation disguised as science?"